It has been estimated that nearly 700,000 people will visit Pittsburgh when the NFL Draft is held here April 23-25. That will be a lot for a small city of 300,000 residents, but the national exposure and boost in revenue are coming at a great time.
New visitors to Pittsburgh will be amazed at the natural beauty of the Monongahela, Allegheny and Ohio rivers and our abundance of water. They will marvel at the Golden Triangle nestled between the cliffs.
Those who make it to Mt. Washington will experience the greatest urban vista in the world. They may even notice that the Downtown skyline is sculpted, sloping from the top of the U.S. Steel Tower to the Point and down to the rivers — allowing sunshine in and preserving views out.
They will walk the streets of the Strip District, where the Pittsburgh melting pot still exists. They will have an espresso at La Prima, buy some cheese at Penn Mac, grab a fish sandwich at Wholey’s and get their football gear at Yinzers.
Many will be surprised and amazed that the “Smoky City” is now a gem. What they will not get to see is how Pittsburgh got here. And that is the best part of the story.
In his book “Don’t Call Me Boss,” Michael P. Weber describes a city that seemed beyond rescue when Mayor David L. Lawrence was elected in 1945.
An English visitor said as early as 1913, “In Pittsburgh, man befouled the streams, bedraggled their banks, ripped up the cliffs, hacked down the trees and dumped refuse in their stead. He sowed the imposing heights with hovels and set beneath them black mills to cover everything far and wide with a film of black smoke.”
It had only gotten worse through the war years, and Lawrence moved quickly to form a partnership with Richard King Mellon to save Pittsburgh. That leadership partnership — the Irish Catholic Democratic mayor from the slums at the Point and the Republican head of one of the richest families in the world — cleaned the rivers and the air, eliminated slums for new housing and commerce and developed parks in the Downtown business district.
And long before the collapse of Big Steel, their partnership began to shift Pittsburgh’s economy toward education and medicine, guaranteeing economic survival. All of it was properly called the “Pittsburgh Renaissance.”
There was a second Pittsburgh Renaissance starting in the 1970s under Mayor Richard Caliguiri who also partnered with the Allegheny Conference — the world’s most powerful Pittsburgh-based CEOs — to rebuild Downtown, rejuvenate the neighborhoods, save the Pittsburgh Pirates and create a Downtown Cultural District.
Later mayors followed the public-private partnership model. Mayor Sophie Masloff built two new city neighborhoods, created the first high-tech district and led the fight — along with the Allegheny Conference — for a new sales tax that saved our region’s cultural, sports and entertainment venues.
Mayor Tom Murphy built the new baseball park that Masloff had envisioned along with a new football stadium and attracted new businesses and high-tech firms to the city. He built the trails that reclaimed our riverfronts and built a world-class convention center that is now an iconic symbol of Pittsburgh’s future.
Anyone who wants to know how a town once described as “hell with the lid off” got to be what it is today should know this. Our leaders — Democrats and Republicans, politicians and CEOs, the rich and not so rich — never let their differences get in the way of what was good for Pittsburgh. Pittsburghers stood together and fought for this town over and over again.